When Physical is better than Virtual

So, as we head towards the tail end of COVID-19 lockdown and bringing with it a relaxation of the social distancing (a term that will live for us indefinitely) rules, businesses are either pulling staff back to the office or embracing remote working.

Here at vBridge, we ran a “virtual office” via Microsoft Teams for the duration of level 4 and most of level 3 lockdown, when all staff was required to work remotely. This worked exceptionally well as we could maintain a high level of social interaction with each other during the workday, whether via chat, voice calls, and video calls. In fact, we ran an entire one-day business strategy session over Teams with several breakout sessions. We embraced the situation and used the tools we had, not only to support ourselves but more importantly to support our customers.

That said, returning to the office and settling back to the “old” normal it was evident that while technology could provide us with a very near experience to what we had, what it couldn’t do is capture someone’s body language or those spur of the moment discussions that come about while making a coffee from Rocket (our beloved coffee machine) even sitting around the bar leaner while eating lunch and debating topics of interest.

There is something to be said about physical social interaction and robust in-person discussions around the workplace so we shouldn’t be in a rush to completely de-centralize staff but rather strike a balance between working from the office and working remotely. Delivering services to staff irrespective of where they are working from becomes critical, and having infrastructure residing on a robust IaaS platform like vBridge provides organizations the comfort, confidence, and support they need to deliver.